Hollinger Corp. 
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THE CHANGING CONCEPTION 



OF "THE FACULTY" 



IN 



AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 




BY 



ANDREW F. WEST 

n 

DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL 
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 



A paper read before the Association of American Universities 
at the annual meeting in San Francisco, March 17, 1906. 



C- 



GIFT 

MRS. WOODROW WILSON 

NOV. 25, 1939 



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THE CHANGING CONCEPTION OF "THE 
FACULTY " IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES. 

I. 

The original faculty, and still the necessarily central 
faculty of Arts and Sciences, — the old "college faculty'' 
with all that growth outward and upward has added — is 
as much as this short paper can sketch, even in bare out- 
line. Within our generation it has greatly changed. It 
is our purpose to show not so much the history of that 
change, as the present situation and some of its implica- 
tions. 

The living root of the old faculty, as of every other 
part of the college, was a distinctively Christian impulse. 
It was the belief that in serving the cause of knowl- 
edge and truth by promoting liberal education men 
were serving the cause of Christ. Presidents, trus- 
tees and professors were alike to give themselves 
in self-denial to their several tasks, mindful that 
this holy ideal was to guide and ennoble their 
every effort. And the old root flowered many 
a time in lives of strength and loveliness that remain as 
the fairest memories of the older period. Yet perhaps 
the ideal was too high ever to be realized generally by 
men as men were and still are. Certainly it is. an infin- 
ite pity that a narrow particularism, an insistence on the 
local and clannish, and a consequent sectarian warfare, 
somewhat mitigated by common sense and kindliness, so 
often disfigured the old college that its power for good 
was lessened. Let us make these abatements freely and- 
yet gratefully remember that the old college faculty at 
least professed and tried to show that God is the end of 
all our knowing and that Christ is the Master of the * 
Schools. 



With this ideal, then as now, the fiercely practical 
side of our American temper was found to be at variance. 
The sense of achievement in visible things fought against 
faith in the invisible. A nation had been made and kept 
together. Society had been "installed over a vast con- 
tinent." We were free, as few peoples were, from such 
fearful dangers as poverty, famine and invasion. Men 
could live free from fear. Careers were here for all who 
could make them. The elements of material good for- 
tune were becoming ours beyond any measure known in 
history. And so the rival ideal of success, first in the 
outward and then in the sordid way, has been growing 
with our growth, feeding itself all the while on the old 
eternal human selfishness. It has of course been true at 
all times, and notably so in times of trial like the Revolu- 
tion and Civil War, that the nobler side has asserted it- 
self and that men in their thinking and doing "endured 
as seeing Him who is invisible." But the times of ease, 
plenty and self-indulgence have not been friendly to the 
old college ideal, any more than they are friendly to the 
homely virtues of simplicity, clear sincerity, scrupulous 
respect for the rights of others and modest independence. 

Moreover, as is almost too obvious to need mention 
and yet so clamorously important as to need sure remem- 
brance, our whole life, including its educational prepara- 
tion, has been getting more and more complex and tense. 
The individual counts for less and less. The aggregate, 
whether organized in corporate form or disorganized in 
wild mob-like drifts of opinion and action, counts for 
more. To keep pace with our progress, to master the 
material of our lives so that the individual shall not be 
overwhelmed and crushed, some sort of organization 
becomes more and more imperative, if only that each man 



may have a fair chance to get his own good by co-operat- 
ing and sharing in the common good. And out of this 
state of things has come an impatient message to our 
larger universities first, and then to the lesser ones. It 
is that efficiency must be our watchword (and catch- 
word), that education is a business, and that universities 
are corporations like banks, railroads, factories, depart- 
ment stores and insurance companies. Notice is being 
served that if our university faculties do not conform to 
this notion, they must give way to faculties that will. 
This is the message. What have we to say about it ? 

II. 

Let us make some admissions. First of all, there has 
been a great deal of folly talked about the freedom of 
faculties and of individual professors. Would that the 
fact a man is a professor were sufficient proof that he is 
also a man of sense. Sometimes it is not even proof 
that he is a scholar. Before we talk of larger freedom, 
we must be sure in a given case that the individual pro- 
fessor, and in each faculty at least the strong majority, is 
fit to be free, — that is, sure to serve well the one supreme 
end for which professors and faculties legitimately exist. 
That end is intellectual and moral freedom, not for the 
professors alone, but for all others with whom they come 
in contact. It is a case where reciprocity is the only pro- 
tection. 

And so the actual assumption of responsibility for 
using this freedom well must come in to prove a man fit 
to be free — to temper the judgment, to make us wise 
in counsel, considerate in action, tactful in winning 
men, swift to help and slow to harm the university 
we represent. If no professor proposed a resolution 



in faculty, I will not say unless it were sensible, but unless 
he were man enough to see it through in execution, taking 
the blame for failure and letting whoever would do so 
lay claim to the glory in case of success, we should then 
see a faculty undeniably fit for the widest freedom, — an 
irresistible engine for the best work. So, too, if no pro- 
fessor coveted notoriety or lowered the academic tone of 
his lectures to attract attendance and applause, whether 
by exploiting some novelty or serving up the things of 
superficial charm to please idle hearers, how much more 
boldly could we demand more freedom for each as well 
as for all. Plain common sense, open-eyed sympathy, 
tolerance, modesty, balance, — these are some of the old 
undramatic virtues needed as guarantees that the free pro- 
fessor or the free faculty will be beneficently free. And 
yet let us not admit too much in this connection, for the 
fact that American faculties are not stronger in these 
virtues, and consequently deserving of more freedom, is 
not first of all the fault of our faculties, but of the presi- 
dents and trustees who choose them, or else the fault of 
insufficient resources. 

Secondly, we must admit that universities are corpo- 
rations and that education is a business. Let us do so 
heartily. Is it not time we got away from hand-to-mouth 
living and rule-of-thumb reckoning, and recognized that 
business has its laws and that experts must conduct it? 
Under American conditions the management of a large 
university requires some stable corporate base in the 
form of trustees or regents, and one executive head, a 
president. Unless we are to go wavering and drifting, 
the primacy of president and trustees must be maintained. 
We cannot in this imitate any old-world system. 



It is an immense gain that most of our universities 
are now so well managed on the business side. The wis- 
dom of their investments has made more than one uni- 
versity treasurer's report a guide to prudent investors 
outside. The very complexities and annoyances in the 
terms of gifts and endowments, the variety of accounts 
and securities and the calculation of probable revenues on 
less certain bases than many business enterprises possess 
have evoked surprising wisdom. The net result has been 
that our leading universities, so far as their hampering 
conditions permit, usually make every dollar do its work. 
Would any man in his senses suppose that American 
faculties could or would do as well ? 

Then the same corporation must use business sense in 
creating and maintaining a faculty. The best professors 
procurable for the terms that can be offered, selection 
and promotion on recommendation of the president, and 
the unifying of educational policy by means of the same 
sole executive head, are necessities of our situation. In 
all this our universities have been learning the lessons of 
modern business efficiency. 

III. 

Nevertheless, if this is the sum of the proposition 
that university education is a business, our faculties are 
in a bad way, because it means the destruction of their 
intellectual and moral freedom by reason of the substitu- 
tion of commercial for academic standards. That this 
is the chief menace at the present time to the self-respect 
and usefulness of our professors and faculties must be 
evident to all who know them. It is of course quite pos- 
sible that we are in a transitional period, and that our 



faculties are moving with an inevitable trend of events. 
That, however, remains to be seen. But if it is so, we 
may be sure of one other thing, and that is a progressive 
impairing of academic standards and an ensuing degrada- 
tion of our faculties to the condition of mere employees. 
So far as this happens, universities cease living and begin 
dying. To avert such a result, or even the slightest 
menace of it, must we not then fight again the old fight 
for our academic birthright, and take part anew in the 
fidxv aOdvaros for a reasonable freedom, intellectual and 
moral, personal and collective. Can university profes- 
sors who are men give any but one answer to such a 
question ? 

The trouble with the theorem "education is a business" 
is that it is only a preliminary half-truth, — the half-truth 
which, however, fills the eye and mind of our businessmen. 
The truth in it is that business method is the means, but 
not the end of education. The other and better half is that 
"the business of a university is education," — the half 
which makes the first half valuable. And while the trouble 
in professors is that they are too often pitiably ignorant 
of the wholesome laws of business, the mate to this fact 
is that the business world is almost wholly ignorant of 
the laws of education. "Your plant is idle in the sum- 
mer," said a British manufacturer to an Oxford profes- 
sor. "You ought to put on a shift of men for that job." 
"The trouble with your plant," said one of our captains 
of industry lately, "is that your output will not stand 
business tests. Every boy you graduate ought to be your 
standard finished product. Otherwise you should dis- 
card him early in the course as waste." "Suppose it hap- 
pens to be your boy," he was asked. "And suppose this 
sample of waste turns out later to be a valuable by- 



product, or even the real thing. What then?" His ans- 
wer was a prompt and creditable "I don't know." The 
region of his ignorance included the domain of college 
education. If then it be true that the very training which 
makes a man a professor dims his business faculties, is it 
not fully as true that the training which absorbs the life 
of a business man blinds his educational perceptions? 
How else, then, can this conscious or unconscious antag- 
onism be mediated except by recognizing that each has a 
lawful hemisphere? The hemisphere of business is 
secure enough from invasion, but for the hemisphere of 
education we badly need a new Monroe Doctrine. 

Let us stick to our text that the one business of a uni- 
versity is education. It will then be clear that the character 
and extent of business methods allowable in conducting 
a university must be governed by the kind of business 10 
be conducted. It will also be clear that while the trustees 
or regents must strive to hold the university faithful to its 
trust and to secure what will make it efficient in its every 
part, the faculty alone is the body capable, or to be made 
capable, of the conduct of all educational business accord- 
ing to educational standards. The first dangerous in- 
vasion of commercialism is naturally made upon the 
corporation, the body which connects the university with 
the outside practical world, the body which is therefore 
most accessible to attack. One and another trustee in the 
laudable desire for efficiency is apt to think first of the 
efficiency with which he is most familiar, the efficiency 
of the bank, the railroad, the business house. Under 
this impulse he unconsciously veers away from the aca- 
demic point of view. Soon others turn away ; enough to 
make a working majority, and naturally the first point 
of common convergence is in centralizing the deliberative 



as well as active functions of the university, including 
much of the proper business of the faculty, and even of 
the trustees or regents, in the person of one head officer — 
the president. 

I believe most firmly in high powers and, in grave 
emergencies, irresistible powers for every university 
president, in quick control of everything at short range. 
But that is one thing, a safe and wise thing, provided 
always it is done in the environment of open inspection, 
quick accountability, close participation of all competent 
members of boards and faculties, and the most scrupu- 
lous jealousy in maintaining for everyone the utmost 
freedom of initiative, both in speech and action, that can 
be used with loyalty. Otherwise, so far as sharing in 
the common business goes, and so far as personal use- 
fulness is concerned, we make boards and faculties per- 
sonally and collectively less efficient for the very end they 
are created to promote, and not the advantages but the 
abuses of the business world are ominously repeated in 
the form of "dummy" trustees and "dummy" professors. 

IV. 

The profound change, then, now in progress in our 
American faculties is in the relation of the fac- 
ulty to the president. The tendency borrowed 
from the business world, and increasing with the 
number of persons in the faculty, is toward in- 
dividual and collective dependence on the president. 
And yet, so far as this does not curtail the self-respect of 
honorable professors by abridging their freedom to teach 
what they really believe, or to take part fully in the busi- 
ness of the faculty without prejudice to their standing or 
livelihood, even if they do not happen to agree in one or 

10 



another important matter with the president, then, what- 
ever is to be said against this increasing dependence as a 
danger to efficiency, it cannot be criticised as an attack on 
personal freedom. And it is here we think the test should 
be found as to what constitutes a professor's reasonable 
freedom. For, after all, the university must pull together, 
or it will pull apart. And though the head is not the 
whole body or the major part of the body, the academic 
body, like the human, must have a head, unless it is to be 
a lifeless trunk, and only one head, unless it is to be a 
monstrosity. 

Is there anything, then, that needs to be suggested in 
order that the faculty, keeping to its own function 
and showing loyal deference to its head, may be kept 
from deterioration as the sole organ whose function 
it is actually to conduct university education efficiently. 
Let us examine some of the suggestions that have been 
made: 

i. That the president, as the responsible head, should 
initiate all important measures of educational policy. This 
means that he initiates such measures either alone, or by 
putting them in operation by the action of the corpora- 
tion and thus imposing them on the faculty, or by intro- 
ducing them in faculty after shaping them in conference 
with a committee of the faculty, or by proposing them 
first in open faculty. There is something to be said for 
even this extreme view. It is that the university has one 
clear policy and that the president has untrammeled op- 
portunity with practically exclusive responsibility for doing 
whatever he thinks should be done. Let us take a daring 
step and go so far as to say that there may be momentous 
occasions when the president must "go it alone" or face 
an absolute impasse. Let us trust such occasions may 



ii 



not occur, nor even occasions when the corporation and 
president may come to feel they must join to impose un- 
welcome laws on reluctant faculties. Such situations 
merely argue a university to be in a very bad way. 

Introducing measures of policy after shaping them 
in a committee or department does of course recognize 
that there is value in expert counsel, and introduction in 
open faculty recognizes and welcomes the help and 
advice of all. These are natural methods for any presi- 
dent who wishes his policies to be understood by his col- 
leagues, and the latter method is the one which insures 
the most cordial assent and in the long run the greatest 
efficiency, though it must be confessed the penalty is 
sometimes the long suffering endurance of professors 
who "darken counsel by words without knowledge." 
When the first reference of a measure is made from the 
faculty to its committee for digestion and formulation, 
rather than by first reference of measures in pre-digested 
form from the president and a committee to the faculty, 
both the sense of freedom and of responsibility are quick- 
ened in the minds of the faculty as in no other way. Yet 
whichever of these various modes the president may use, 
the general thesis that the president should initiate all 
important measures of policy has more against it than for 
it. Every measure thus proposed becomes an adminis- 
tration measure and seems to challenge at the outset the 
loyalty and security of every one who may not be able to 
agree with it. In such circumstances the free utterance 
of real opinion, unless it happens to be in substantial ac- 
cord with the measure proposed, becomes almost impos- 
sible. Self criticism is one of the necessary educational 
functions of a university in order that all its measures 
may have the preliminary test as to whether or no they 



12 



are well-considered on all sides and will work well when 
put in operation. Whenever for any reason the atmos- 
phere of a faculty room is not friendly to this free utter- 
ance, the results are sure to be disheartening. Some pro- 
fessors will develop a cynical disregard of their duty to 
speak what they think, the weaker ones will be con- 
strained to evasion or even official hypocrisy, and all will 
exhibit in varying degrees a loss of interest in the welfare 
of the university except in so far as their own personal 
fortunes are affected. This turns professors into place- 
holders and place-hunters. The logical end is the de- 
struction of responsibility and consequently of interest 
on the part of the faculty in the important measures of 
policy on which the higher welfare of the university de- 
pends. Need it be added, by way of warning to those 
who believe in subjecting universities to the standards of 
the business world, that a faculty thus circumstanced 
is bound to become increasingly inefficient, and also unat- 
tractive to the best professors. 

2. There is the suggestion of dual control by the 
president and faculty. This seems to me worse than the 
former ; for if the one seems to spell autocracy, the other 
spells weakness and discord. In case the president is a 
strong man, it means ceaseless friction between him and 
an oligarchy of professors. If he is a weak man, it 
means the presidency is reduced to a chairmanship by 
courtesy. In either event it means structural weakness 
in the university and an unsteady attitude which keeps 
producing trouble inside and distrust outside. 

3. Some may perhaps favor the idea of faculty as- 
cendancy. For us Oxford and Cambridge are its best 
examples. The professors there are virtually their own 
trustees and they choose their own Vice-Chancellor. The 

13 



plan has one very great advantage — personal freedom in 
a higher degree than is known in our faculties or even in 
Germany. But let any one who would introduce it here 
remember the abysmal differences that yawn between that 
situation and ours. Oxford and Cambridge are indeed 
more democratic in the matter of professorial freedom 
than we are. But it is a democratic freedom that rests 
upon an aristocratic presupposition, a freedom of the 
professorial caste resting on a tradition sanctioned by 
centuries of privilege, checked and counter-checked by 
the balancing of intercollegiate rivalry, and issuing in 
restriction of all initiative to a small council, elected, to be 
sure, but so constituted as to be changeable only very 
slowly. Admirably in accord as it is with the stable and 
soberly balanced love of liberty, "broadening slowly down 
from precedent to precedent," that has made England 
great, it is not a faculty model that can be reproduced 
here. But may it never perish there ! 

4. There remains to be considered what can be done 
under our own conditions to invigorate and perfect the 
faculty, not only to save it from the subtle poison of com- 
mercialism, but to make it do its educational business 
efficiently with full self-respect and in sure harmony with 
the president and corporation. I believe the one thing 
to be done is to revive in full power the democracy of the 
faculty, with its free president honored supremely and 
followed steadily as the one natural as well as official 
leader of free professors. Only by following this path 
shall we be enabled to avoid the rank commercialism 
which believes in its heart that a university is something 
like a store where the trustees are the proprietors, the 
president the manager, the professors the employees, and 
the students the capricious customers. 

14 



And here we have to stop a moment to notice a futile 
remedy that appears in many forms. It is the remedy 
of committees and departments and councils and senates. 
We are organized to death. It is the "worship of mach- 
inery" all over again. Of course these things have con- 
stant and even indispensable uses. Of course we must 
know where things are, or we shall never find them. For 
the routine business, the ever recurring humdrum task, 
the mechanics and economics of our work, we shall 
always be needing these things, — but always as our ser- 
vants, never as our masters. If behind the complex of 
our committees we do not have the watchful criticism and 
active co-operation of the whole faculty, — if the faculty 
does not really understand what its agents are doing, or 
what their measures mean, then the committees are vir- 
tually the faculty, and the faculty becomes little more than 
a listless and dwindling audience. This may possibly do 
well enough for routine business, but never for the under- 
standing or co-operative execution of a great policy. For 
unless a faculty actually controls all its parts and agen- 
cies, it cannot do its business in the best way, nor can it 
long maintain its just freedom. 

Let us face the situation. American faculties are 
weaker than they ought to be, so far as concerns their 
power to maintain educational standards and to perform 
their own educational business. Their great growth 
has called for better organization, but organization has 
progressed too much without regard to the fact that the 
object is not organization, but education. The greater 
centralization of functions in the president, with all its 
advantages, has been at the expense of the free and proper 
exercise of the functions both of faculties and corpora- 
tions. But this is not all. The decline of the old col- 

15 



lege ideal, which involved as one of its corollaries a 
definite liberal education by means of a few common 
studies of central importance, has been profoundly in- 
fluencing the character of our supply of professors. Less 
and less emphasis has been placed on the general make-up 
of the man, and more and more on his specialized knowl- 
edge. The destructive theory that a professor is solely 
a teacher or investigator, and no longer a whole man, has 
shorn him of a priceless part of his academic citizenship. 
This view has been followed by its sequel, that the pro- 
fessor is concerned only with his specialty. And so not 
only have we been acquiescing in the view that his inten- 
sive special knowledge of one subject or part of a sub- 
ject is properly accompanied by an extensive gen- 
eral ignorance of other subjects, but we have been cheer- 
fully accepting professors who are almost totally blind in 
regard to the affairs of university education. Professors 
have been going by such differing paths of preliminary 
training into their several by-paths of special study that 
they are not only getting far apart intellectually, but find 
they have no one common ground to which they may 
ever return and meet in full fellowship. It is the very 
satire of our history that along with centralization of the 
presidential functions and the constitution of elaborate 
machinery to keep things working together, there has 
been a corresponding dispersion, from another cause, of 
the men who most need to stand constantly together in 
counselling for the best good of their universities. This 
must be changed, if our faculties are to consist more and 
more of men of all-round ability, men who are able to 
see and fit to solve larger questions with the moderation 
of wisdom. This means a renewal and better realization 
of the old college ideal which aimed to turn boys, not first 

16 



of all into merchants or bankers or lawyers or professors 
as such, but into well-balanced self-directing strong men. 
If this standard shall be restored to its primacy, we shall 
see in operation a force indispensable for the production 
of professors who are fit to be free. Meanwhile, recog- 
nizing the full rights of all parties involved, and recog- 
nizing further the need of beginning without delay, the 
all important thing just now is to revive in vigor the 
democracy of the faculty. This means that it is the duty 
of every member to take part and make his voice heard 
in the business of the faculty, without arrogance and 
without fear, until such time as it becomes clear to his 
colleagues that he is not fit. Then he should subside. 
How shall we ever be educated as faculty members unless 
this attempt is made? There will be some time wasted. 
Unwise suggestions will find utterance. They will meet 
with their natural corrective in the criticism of others. It 
will be well worth while. One priceless result will be that 
whatever the faculty does will be its own free act. With 
this will come the sobering influence of responsibility to 
make all men who are not without sense use their liberty 
sensibly- Other good things will follow. A living tra- 
dition in things intellectual and moral will be established, 
a self-renewing tradition that will enable the university 
to exhibit to the world with some show of definiteness and 
continuity the ideals for which it stands. These are the 
only traditions that have a chance to outlast the men who 
make them. 

To this end committees and executive officers, such 
as deans, heads of departments and chairmen, should 
really be the choice of the faculty, even though the presi- 
dent names them. All committees and all officers used 
by the faculty in its service should be accountable to the 

17 



faculty and their reports and proposals should be freely 
debated. 

But what, it may be asked, is to happen in case a fac- 
ulty and its president do not agree ? A presidential veto 
is no remedy here. So far as I can learn, it has never 
been used with satisfaction to any one concerned. What 
then? I see only one way. If, after debate, a faculty 
persists in its action, the right of the president, on record- 
ing his dissent, to take the whole matter for review to the 
corporation should be a matter of course, and unless the 
faculty is overwhelmingly against the president, a wise 
corporation will usually sustain him. But nothing will 
have been smothered. The voice of the faculty will have 
been heard, and responsibility will be placed on the presi- 
dent and corporation, where it belongs. Contrariwise 
if the president accedes to some faculty action he does 
not approve, but does not think needs to be taken to the 
corporation, then again the responsibility is placed where 
it belongs. If it turns out that the action of the faculty 
was wise, the responsibility is rightly placed on the fac- 
ulty, and the president wins approval for his considerate- 
ness. If it turns out that the action of the faculty was 
unwise, then again the responsibility is rightly placed on 
the faculty and the president's opinion gains new weight. 
We do not need more machinery. We need this com- 
mon understanding. It will make steadily for justice, 
peace, freedom and efficiency. 

No university ever acquires true grandeur unless its 
faculty is made up of free men. No faculty discharges 
its duty happily and amply unless it is entirely free to 
propose and debate what it thinks right, and finally, no 
self-respecting faculty will do other than help its presi- 
dent, whether it happens to agree with him or not, so 

18 



long as he devotes himself faithfully to his arduous 
task. That task is to promote among his col- 
leagues, his students, and all whom his univer- 
sity can influence, the intellectual and moral free- 
dom of men. And so I return to the opening thought: 
The old college ideal is the true one. We need it more 
than ever to save our universities, — presidents, trustees, 
professors, students and alumni, and all whom they can 
influence — from the degrading personal and official ser- 
vility that comes from commercializing our higher edu- 
cation. 



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